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Wednesday, October 17, 2018

It’s hard to believe there can be too much of a good thing
until you’re faced with it. That goes for a room in your home that seems to
have more square footage than you know what to do with! Never fear, dear readers.
Hampton Roads’ furniture specialists since 1960 are proud to share with you
some designer’s tricks to scale down that behemoth into something more human, a
space that’s even intimate if you want.

Smart Furniture
Tricks for Instant Coziness

A common rookie design mistake is to manufacture smallness
by trying to employ small pieces of furniture in a big space. This backfires
because the first thing you notice is all the dead space around them. Actually,
if you pick furniture that fits the room’s real proportions well, such as long
sofas and consoles, it makes the room appear smaller. Placing the furniture
along the walls, as though it were part of the wall, works wonders as well.

Doing the Shrinking-Room
Shuffle: Arrangement That’s Magic!

An obvious solution to a too spacious room is to break it up
into two or more rooms. Don’t want to bring in the contractor to add walls? No
worries. An accent folding partition (room divider) can inexpensively do the
same thing while giving you flexibility if you change your mind or your needs
for the room shift. Another designer’s tip is simply to treat the room as if the
dividing walls were there by clustering furniture for different uses in various
spots: sofa and loveseat combo gathered around the TV, bistro counter-height table and chairs in another spot, and so on. How about your whole home bar
taking up a third of the floor space? Your eyes will focus on only one section
at a time and thus you won’t be overwhelmed by the room anymore.

Light and Color
Tricks

A standby for interior designers is light creating the illusion
of space. So what do you do when your room’s too big, brick up the windows and
light the room with candles? While we’d love to sell you accent candle-holder sets, you don’t need to do anything that drastic. Just choose more subdued,
less reflective colors for your room’s palette, from the furniture such as a
living room sofa to your area rug. Recommended hues to turn your echo-ey
airplane hangar of a room into an inviting space for your friends are charcoal
gray, burgundy, deep green, and chocolate brown.

Patterns and Textures
That Fill Your Space

Big, striking patterns on your furniture and draperies,
again agreeing with the room’s proportions rather than trying to fight them,
fills the space visually, scaling down your brain’s impression of it. Good
old-fashioned wallpaper works for this too. Another design trick: avoid anything
with too much shine such as chrome. Stay away from lacquered wood, for example.
Try painted or stained finishes instead. Metal should be dull or wrought-iron.
Mirrors in these cases are a no-go.